You can most likely do this with xmodmap (http://www.xfree86.org/4.2.0/xmodmap.1.html), although it will probably take a little bit of tinkering.

One tool which will help you on this journey is the program xev (http://linuxreviews.org/man/xev/). It opens a window, and shows you what code each button of the mouse generates (including scrolls which are basically buttons).

unfortunately, the mouse wheel only has 1 button under it [no forward click, backward click] which is normally setup as "middle click". some programs have ability to change the middle click function to something else, but, you would never be able to do a "forward click/backward click" with it.

unfortunately, the mouse wheel only has 1 button under it [no forward click, backward click] which is normally setup as "middle click". some programs have ability to change the middle click function to something else, but, you would never be able to do a "forward click/backward click" with it.

While it doesn't look like a button, the clicks of the wheel seem to be treated like a button press. The Kensington trackball on my desk registered a button4 press and button4 release for turning the wheel to the right and a button5 press and release for turning it to the left.

Now the precision necessary to do this seems much more painful then using the mouse buttons, but I'll leave that part to another conversation